Weathersonde – Nearby Landing Notification

At our hackerspace brmlab, one of the things we do is picking up landed weather sondes. In short, fun hardware literally falling off the sky, several times a day, every day. These are stratospheric balloons used for weather data prediction, launched from various sites, that reach the 35km altitude, then the balloon bursts and it lands back on the ground at a random location. At the whole time, it transmits its current GPS coordinates via radio, making this a rather exciting sub-class of geocaching.

As a simple hack today (idea by chido), I created a simple script sonde.sh that is designed to be run three times a day, runs sonde trajectory prediction (a predict.habhub.org service – example) and if the sonde is predicted to land in a certain radius, reports that with a link to the prediction. By default, it is connected to jendabot, one of our brmlab IRC robotic minions, written in an appealingly crazy way as a collection of bash scripts.